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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2831 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for March 8, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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My guess is that people believe that diet can work both in the short and long term because they see it all the time, because I do. There are people for whom it doesn't work, for some reason, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.

I also believe that in version of set point theory but in my version that set point is possible to affect for the vast majority through persistent weight change.

I'm excited about the new medications though.

Dieting works in the short term. It almost never works in the long term. There are numerous studies which demonstrate this.

To steelman the status quo, there wasn't (until semaglutide) anything that reliably worked. Diet and exercise aren't bad things, and even short term weight loss might have positive benefits. Similarly it's very rare for alcoholics to quit over long periods of time. It doesn't mean that they shouldn't at least try.

This feels like playing word games. To me "doesn't work" means "it won't have an effect, no matter how much you do it", not " people will stop doing it after a while".

Doesn't feel that way at all to me. If compliance is < 10%, then the intervention most assuredly doesn't "work" from a public health standpoint.

It's like saying to a smoker "stop smoking" and then saying your intervention is effective. "It would have worked if they had listened".

Nobody ever tries to put these fat people in work camps.

If WW2 history classes have taught anyone anything, it's that dieting works.

Every time this topic comes up someone posts something like this. Every time.

That's because this argument forces people to disambiguate between two definitions of dieting:

  • consuming fewer calories

  • voluntarily consuming fewer calories in the presence of abundant hyperpalatable food by exercising your willpower

CI<CO works. Yes, BMR goes down as you lose weight, TEF goes down as you eat less food, NEAT goes down if you diet too hard, but that doesn't change the laws of thermodynamics: CI<CO? Weight loss.

Voluntarily staying at the level of CImaint=COmaint works for some people, fails for others. Why? Two options:

  • they let they CO creep below COmaint, probably by dropping EAT. I think it's less probable, since EAT has a small impact

  • they let their CI creep above CImaint

Why do they stay at CI>CImaint? Because they enjoy it, it gives them hedons. But why do they enjoy it more than staying in shape, while others don't?

  • does eating more tasty food simply have a larger weight in their hedonic formula? Is it an endogenous or an exogenous weight?

  • or does their formula discount future hedons/negahedons at a higher rate? Someone might take into account the dieting they will have to do to lose the weight they are gaining by eating this brownie at -6h and eating the brownie at 5h, while someone else might discount the future dieting to -4h

  • or is there this magic "set point" of CIsp, and every CI<CIsp generates negahedons? Some have it high enough that COsp=CIsp means they have to up their EAT to unsustainable levels

Thank you. I should have posted something like this, but got frustrated. Honestly, I thought understanding this concept was table stakes for having this discussion here, and I was disappointed when a typical normie comment entered the conversation.

It's not a normie comment to say that not eating too much food works when half the population doesn't seem capable of maintaining a healthy size.

Fat people's opinions on dieting are obviously biased in the worst direction, with thin people's opinions having higher value, and formerly-fat-but-now-durably-thin people's opinions even higher.

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